Historically, Passive Optical Networks (PON) have utilized burst-mode operation, or time division multiple access, to handle upstream traffic. The optical line terminal (OLT) assigns timeslots to each optical network unit (ONU) in a master-slave configuration. New ONUs are typically discovered and ranged periodically during what is known as a “quiet window”, where no timeslots are assigned to known ONUs and any ONU wishing to join the PON advertises itself.